Jim Handy, Objective Analysis, on SSDs

Water Rights

SolidFire has launched a campaign about a phenomenon the company calls the “Noisy Neighbor.” This term is used to express a concept in which one very demanding application absorbs all of the data center’s storage resources to the performance detriment of all other applications. The company points out that this leads to performance variability and poor Quality of Service (QoS.) This, in turn, can drive the enterprise to shun cloud-based services.

The SSD Guy sees this phenomenon as something similar to a “Denial of Service” (DoS) attack, or even the way that cuckoos reproduce. One resource demands more than its fair share of support driving performance below acceptable levels. Heck, even the politics of water rights works this way. In this particular case the constrained resource isn’t network bandwidth, food, or water, but storage bandwidth.

At the bottom of its Noisy Neighbor press release SolidFire has posted an interesting infographic that explains this phenomenon and brings the consequences to monetary terms. Naturally it advocates solid state storage as a solution to the problem. It’s worth a look.